New Poll Finds That Young Americans Are Leaning Left

Thus saith the NY Times. For those who take this as good news, it’s too bad that these left-leaning young Americans will be out-reproduced by their right-leaning peers.

Polls reveal my ongoing effort to be honest with myself and others: they are tempting to believe when they support my own views, but so easy to dismiss otherwise because of the many factors by which a poll can be made to return approximately whatever results the pollsters desire. This one, for example, was based on phone interviews with 659 people aged 17-29. The CIA World Factbook reports about 202 million Americans aged 15-64, which means there are likely around 50 million or more aged 17-29.

659 people out of 50 million is 1.318/100,000th of one percent of the total target population. Can any statisticians confirm whether that’s a sufficiently large sample size?